Hasta La Gadget!

Makers looking to squeeze a little cash from the crowd to get a project off the ground have more choice than ever before about which crowdfunding platform to position their project on. From big names like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, to a the go-it-alone route (Selfstarter) or a raft of smaller platforms with various targeted/niche approaches.

And with crowdfunding becoming increasingly, well, crowded, these platforms are having to work harder to poach promising projects off each other.

Case in point: relative newcomer to the crowdfunding platform space, Dragon Innovation, which is focused on hardware and has put in years as a manufacturing consultancy but only months as a crowdfunder platform, nabbed Internet of Things hardware catalyst project, the Wunderbar, out of the clutches of Kickstarter earlier this month.

“After first being accepted to launch on Kickstarter and planning it, we were approached by the expert team at Dragon Innovations in Boston… to launch on their crowdfunding platform,” said Wunderbar’s Jackson Bond, explaining why the switcheroo.

“They conducted a due diligence on the product and really wanted to help us launch it, with PR, marketing, and manufacturing expertise, also because their audience is Internet of Things ready.”

Dragon Innovation isn’t only doing business development via last minute pitches to promising makers. Today it’s stepped up its wooing efforts with an offer of $100,000 in seed funding to all projects that launch on its platform starting from this month and go on to pass $1 million in crowdfunding raised.

So that’s a guarantee of a little follow-on funding if your project can nab a decent chunk of crowdbacking on Dragon’s platform via this January ongoing offer.

It’s worth noting that, to-date, no projects on Dragon Innovation’s platform have passed the one million dollar mark — so clearly it’s hoping to raise its own profile by bagging some higher calibre projects here. Dragon only launched its crowdfunding platform last October, although it’s been offering various services to makers since 2009 (and name-checks MakerBot, LIFX, PerkinElmer, Scout, Romotive, Sifteo and Orbotix as being among its customers).

The most a project using Dragon Innovation’s platform has raised to-date is the $196,682 raised by Tessel: an Internet-controlled microcontroller programmable in JavaScript.

In addition to $100,000 in seed funding — which will come in the form of a convertible note (converting into equity upon predetermined thresholds) — the entrepreneurs behind qualifying projects will be offered anything from Dragon’s suite of services that might help them develop their business further, such as connections to manufacturers and to other potential investors, and consulting about scaling their operations, it said. 

“The primary motivation of this program is to help companies grow and thrive,” Dragon Innovation added — albeit, the business of developing its own crowdfunding platform, and using that platform as an on-ramp to its additive hardware consulting services, is clearly also part of that growth target here. 

“We envision Dragon Innovation as the official home for hardware, providing entrepreneurs everything they need to launch products and scale their companies,” said Scott N. Miller, CEO and co-founder, in a statement.

“By working closely with great entrepreneurs from the very beginning, Dragon can provide a full spectrum of resources and experience to help companies succeed. It makes natural sense for us to extend this commitment in the form of funding to help hardware entrepreneurs achieve success.”

M8 will be the first HTC device with on-screen buttons.

— @evleaks (@evleaks) January 27, 2014

Serial leakster @evleaks has come up with another potential gem about the yet unreleased HTC M8, which is also known as the HTC One+ in other circles, depending on where you get your news sources from. In fact, it has been more or less confirmed over the weekend that the upcoming HTC M8 will feature a display that has 1080 x 1920 resolution, with a very real possibility of it measuring 5” in size. In one of @evleaks’ more recent outings, the HTC M8 might very well hold the honor of being the first HTC smartphone that will feature on-screen buttons, now how about that?

(more…)

Rumor: HTC M8 Has On-Screen Buttons original content from Ubergizmo.

Microsoft now owns another major franchise tied to its Xbox game consoles: Gears of War. That includes “rights to all existing and future games, entertainment experiences and merchandise,” and it looks like a new game (likely for Xbox One) is already …

Google seems to have paid at least $500 million to acquire DeepMind, an artificial intelligence startup that has a number of high-profile investors, and that has demoed tech which shows computers playing video games in ways very similar to human players. Facebook reportedly also tried to buy the company, and the question on most people’s minds is “Why?”

More intelligent computing means more insightful data gathering and analysis, of course. Any old computer can collect information, and even do some basic analytics work in terms of comparing and contrasting it to other sets of data, drawing simple conclusions where causal or correlational factors are plainly obvious. But it still takes human analysts to make meaning from all that data, and to select the significant information from the huge, indiscriminate firehose of consumer data that comes in every day.

AI and machine learning expertise can help improve the efficiency and quality of data gathered by Google and other companies who rely on said information, but it can also set the company up for the next major stage in computing interaction: turning the Internet of Things into the Internet of Companions. Google is hard at work on tech that will make even more of our lives computer-centric, including driverless cars and humanoid robots to take over routine tasks like parcel delivery, but all those new opportunities for computer interaction need a better interface if they’re to become trusted and widely used.

https://twitter.com/chadcat/status/427671366163124224

Google has already been working on building software and tech than anticipates the needs of a user and acts as a kind of personal valet. Google Now parses information from your Gmail and search history to predict what you’ll ask about and provide the information in advance. Now has steadily been growing smart and incorporating more data sources, but it still has plenty of room for improvement, and there’s no better way to anticipate a human’s needs than with a computer that thinks like one.

Another key component of Google’s future strategy has to do with hardware. The company’s last high-profile acquisition was Nest Labs, which it bought for $3.2 billion in cash earlier this month. Nest’s smart thermostat also uses a significant amount of machine learning to help anticipate the schedule and needs of its users, which is something that DeepMind could assist with on a basic level. But there’s a larger opportunity, as once again a more human element could help make the Internet of Things a more accessible concept for the average user.

We’ve seen little beyond computers that can play video games from DeepMind, but that demonstration speaks volumes about what Google can do with the company. Robotics and hardware investments like those already made by the company are interesting, to be sure, but DeepMind is in many ways the thread that will draw all these separate initiatives together: There’s an adoption disconnect between technically impressive innovations, and convincing everyday end users to actually embrace them. DeepMind could help humanize tech that seems otherwise deeply impersonal (and in the case of self-driving cars, even anti-human) in a way that spurs uptake.

More human machines could be a big reason why Google has reportedly created an ethics board to supervise the use of DeepMind’s AI tech. Google probably isn’t that worried about the possibility of accidentally creating SkyNet, but when you start building computing devices that think and act like humans, you’re bound to get into fraught moral territory. Both in terms of both what said tech can learn and know about its users, as well as what, if any, responsibility we have to treat said tech differently than any standard computer.

Depending on your view of Google and what it does, the DeepMind acquisition is either troubling or exciting. Of course, it has the potential to be both, as does any potential advancement in AI and machine learning, but I can’t help but be enthralled by the possibilities of the picture Google is painting with its latest big-picture moves. More than any other, it seems to be committed to a future that lives up to the vision of the science fiction blockbusters we all grew up with, and it’s impossible to deny the allure of that kind of ambition.

Everybody loves some good Earth porn, and if the mission currently in progress goes off without a hitch, we’ll all be in for a lot more of it. A pair of cosmonauts are currently on a spacewalk to install an Earth-facing Ultra HD camera on the ISS that will eventually livestream our blue marble to the internet in (almost) realtime.

Read more…